QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
Chapter 16
Sage Publications Limited
2008 Michael D. Myers
All Rights Reserved
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Introduction
There are many
different ways to
analyse qualitative
data
Narrative analysis is
one approach to
analysing and
interpreting qualitative
data
Narrative analysis
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Narrative
Narrative is defined by the Concise Oxford
English Dictionary as a a spoken or written
account of connected events; a story (Soanes &
Stevenson, 2004)
Traditionally, a narrative requires a plot, as well
as some coherence. It has some sort of ordered
sequence, often in linear form, with a beginning,
middle, and end
Narratives also usually have a theme and a main
point, or a moral, to the story
Narrative analysis
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Personal and organizational narratives
A narrative can refer to the life history of a
person you have interviewed, a story about a
significant aspect of their life, or a specific event.
A personal narrative might refer to their diaries,
journals or letters (Chase, 2005)
Organizational narratives refer to the history or
stories about organizations. Organizational
narratives are the main mode of knowing and
communicating in organizations
(Czarniawska,1998)
Narrative analysis
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Approaches to narrative analysis
Writing versus reading narrative
Top-down versus bottom-up
Realist, constructivist and critical
Genres (adventure story, fairytale, romance,
tragedy ...)
Voice (authoritative, supportive, joint voice)
Postmodern narrative and ante-narrative
approaches (deconstruction, grand narrative,
microstoria ...)
Narrative analysis
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
How to use narrative analysis
If you are planning to collect narratives during
interviews (and hence narratives will be your main
source of data), then you need to work at inviting
stories from your informants
If you are planning to write a narrative of an
organization, then the typical form in management
and organization studies is to write it up as a case
study. Case studies usually use chronology as the
main organizing device (Czarniawska, 1998)
The Labov/Cortazzi model suggests six elements to
every narrative: abstract, orientation, complication,
evaluation, result, and conclusion
Narrative analysis
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Critique of narrative analysis
Narrative analysis is very useful in the creation
or critique of organizational narratives. It is an
in-depth approach to analyzing qualitative data
Narrative analysis is potentially an excellent way
in which we can enter into a dialogue with
managers and business people in organizations
(Czarniawska, 1998). It is one way of making our
research more relevant to practice
One disadvantage is that it can be very time
consuming to collect life histories of people, and
even more time consuming to analyse them
Narrative analysis
